WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 309 



though the true Walton angler is happy catching any size 

 of fish ; a six-ounce trout to me, in a Highland burn, is almost 

 as good as a whale. Notwithstanding this delicate tact 

 on our part, whaling was introduced one evening in the 

 smoking-room, and the writer was rather surprised to find 



A Finner's Head 



that several men had very little idea of the functions of whale- 

 bone or its place in the whale's anatomy, so we had to draw 

 diagrams, such as these here reproduced, to describe shortly 

 the way whalebone works. This is a side view of the head 

 of a finner whale ; it shows the outer edges of the whalebone 



A 



plates that hang round the sides of the upper jaw. The 

 blades vary in thickness in different whales ; in the common 

 Balsenoptera Borealis, such as this, it measures about a 

 quarter of an inch thick and is about two feet at deepest. The 

 blade has hair on its inside edge. If the whale's head were 

 cut across between the nose and eye, or corner of its mouth, 



